Since Google's Penguin update, many webmasters are worried
about the
importance of backlinks. Last Wednesday, Google's Matt Cutts talked
about the importance of links in an online interview. Here are the key
takeaways.

In the news: Google gives contradicting penalty
information to some webmasters, another company tries to challenge
Google, guest blogs should contain the nofollow attribute, and more.

We hope that you enjoy this newsletter and that
it helps you to get more out of your website. Please pass this
newsletter on to your friends.

Best regards,

1. Google’s Matt Cutts talks about the importance of backlinks

Since Google's Penguin update, many webmasters are worried
about the importance of backlinks. Last Wednesday, Google's Matt Cutts
talked about the importance of links in an online interview. Here are the key takeaways from the
interview:

1. Links are still the best way
to rank a website

Matt Cutts made it clear that
the links that point to your website are important:

"Links are still the best way that we’ve found to discover
[how relevant or important somebody is], and maybe over time social or
authorship or other types of markup will give us a lot more information
about that."

2. Link building is not bad

As long as your website is linkworthy, link building is fine:

"The philosophy that we’ve always had is if you make
something that’s compelling then it would be much easier to get people
to write about it and to link to it. [...] Make a fantastic website
that people love and tell their friends about and link to and want to
experience. As a result, your website starts to become stronger and
stronger in the rankings."

3. Don't use press releases for
link building

Most links from press releases do not count in Google's
ranking algorithm. If an editor decides to publish an article on a
newspaper site based on that press release, that link will count.

4. Guest posts can be problematic

According to Matt Cutts, Guest posts can be problematic:

"If people just move away from doing article banks or
article directories or article marketing to guest blogging and they
don’t raise their quality thresholds for the content, then that can
cause problems."

5. Content syndication should be
planned

You must make sure that your website is the original site if
your content is syndicated to other sites. Publish the content before
others and use the rel=canonical attribute.

Good backlinks are very important if you want to get high
rankings on Google and other search engines. The tools in SEOprofiler
help you to get the best possible rankings for your website.

SEOprofiler helps you to find the best keywords, it helps you
to optimize your web page content, it helps you to get good backlinks,
it helps you to analyze your website visitors, and much more.

Best of all, SEOprofiler is a safe search engine optimization
tool that plays by the rules. If you haven't done it yet, create your
SEOprofiler account now:

"First I get a message in GWT stating that, 'Google has
applied a manual spam action.' Then, I clean up the issues, submit a
Reconsideration Request, then get a response saying, 'No manual spam
actions found."'

Note that it did not say that the manual spam action was revoked, only
that there was no spam action found. Yet the original message stated
quite clearly that there was a manual spam action applied, as opposed
to an algorithmic thing."

"Google owns 67 percent of the market in the U.S. as
smaller players like Bing and Yahoo fight for scraps.
But Kansas City, Kan.-based search startup Leap2 doesn’t seem to care
that Google owns the market and knows exactly where it stands. [...]

'The younger generations don’t have the same kind of loyalty we have,'
VanWinkle said. 'They haven’t been using Google for 15 years. They’re
not loyal, frankly. They want something different.'"

In an online discussion, a webmaster wondered why her
website rankings for branded terms dropped since the last penguin
update. Google's Gary Illyes said that the ranking drop was not related
to spammy links:

"These look like normal fluctuations for a site like yours. I don't see
anything that's due to technical issues on our or on your side, so I
would recommend continuing to work on your site, adding new content and
improving existing content."

"A new blog post suggesting that
Google’s non-paid listings make up only a tiny fraction of the entire
search results page has sparked some discussion, though the exact
percentage actually varies on how you count what’s on the page and from
query-to-query. [...]

To
me, the real concern has been the transformation of Google from being a
search engine that pointed out to destination sites (like those
restaurants) to wanting to be a destination of its own.

SEO and organic search is far from dead, and anyone who runs a site can
look at their traffic logs to know how much traffic Google sends them
every day, for free."